Leaving Beyond – Grounded In Scripture

Written by: April J. Buchanan

The love of God reigning in the hearts of His children orders their affections rightly. Their loves, desires, and passions are set upon what God loves and set against what God hates. To the world, such love appears unloving. According to the world’s judgment, it is evil to hate what God hates and to love what God loves. Love must be redefined, affections distorted, and desires disordered before it can be called love by those who are opposed to God.

The world calls it love to affirm, celebrate, and stand alongside what is evil. Yet God calls His people to walk in love toward all, even toward those whose affections, desires, and passions are fixed upon the very things He hates. Such love is contrary to fallen human nature. It requires that a man be born again. His heart must be made new. His mind must continually be sanctified by the truth. The Spirit of God must dwell within him, so that his obedience is no longer mere pretense or reluctant duty, but the fruit of a new life with new affections and desires that glorify God.

The one whose loves were once disordered is made new and is being transformed. He now loves what he once hated and hates what he once loved, most especially the remaining sin within his own heart. The love God works within him produces rightly ordered affections. In loving others, he no longer judges according to his own desires or subjective feelings, but according to the Word of God, which speaks authoritatively concerning what is pure and impure, holy and defiled, sound and unsound, true and erroneous.

Let the heart that has found Christ most beautiful set itself continually upon Him. Let it guard itself from every temptation toward defilement, whether arising from inward corruption or from the pressures of a world that it is called to love, though not as the world loves.

Ordered affections will always expose disordered love. That which is most beautiful stands in contrast to that which is perverse, self-seeking, and devoted to its own comforts, happiness, and desires. Such things are not the love wrought by God in the hearts of His people. True love does not seek its own way. It considers others more significant than itself and is willing to suffer for the good of another when doing so glorifies God.

It is God who works in His people, conforming them more and more to the image of His Son. Therefore, the love He produces cannot but be rightly ordered, for its perfect demonstration has already been shown in Christ.

The world loves its own and seeks its own. This is not the love that God works. Much is called love that bears no resemblance to the love revealed in Scripture. The world loves whatever affirms, celebrates, and promotes its disordered passions set against God. Many who profess Christ know little of the love that calls sinners to repentance and faith, whereby those who are being saved have their affections and desires brought into right order.

The more we behold Christ, the more we love Him, and the more clearly we see. The less we look to Him, the more even the strongest saints may grow weary and faint in a world increasing in depravity, selfishness, self-love, and hatred toward God.

Remember the Lord, dear saint. Let your love abound still more and more in knowledge and all discernment, that it may glorify God. Fear not the opposition of men toward that love which speaks according to the truth and demonstrates itself in obedience to God. The world calls such love hatred because it cannot comprehend it. Yet should God be pleased to grant repentance and faith, those who once despised this love will come to know it for themselves. Then they shall rejoice in that very love they once opposed, for they will behold it fully in Christ.

Let not your love be confused with that of the world, but let it be established in the mind by truth, rightly ordered in the heart, and demonstrated in the life and doctrine of the saint who bears the name of Christ before the world.